Sometimes the most beautiful places on earth are right at home. This is a story about a long held dream that forced itself into reality the other day. Throughout the experience, it retained the elusive quality that makes me wonder if it really happened. It could drift away with the memory, unrepeatable like the scent of jasmine.

For many years, I have been recording music with jazz legend Paul Horn. In later years, Paul has been famous for recording and creating in amazing acoustic environments. He plays the flute, which is as close to the heart and the human voice as an instrument can be. His advice to me has always been, "master your instrument and then you’re free, you just show up and let the moment speak for itself",

No matter what your instrument is, musical, mechanical, mental or otherwise, you can transcend its’ basic technology and speak through it. So, Paul went into the Taj Mahal one night with his flute and a tape recorder and played all night to the circling echoes and incense of the marble dome. Another night was spent in the Queen's Chamber of the Great Pyramid, the dust and passages resounding. Last year he recorded in the Potala Palace in Lhasa, Tibet, the first time in its’ one thousand year history. He was nominated for a Grammy this year for his recording in Canyon de Chez with R. Carlos Nakai, letting their bone and wood traditional flutes ring from the canyon walls.

What I learned from Paul is that it’s not about performing in a famous site but rather to let the environment create it’s own music, to interpret the moment using the tools at hand and the intangible spirit of the place.

A couple of years ago, Paul, my partner Julian Smedley, and I performed together in an old Opera House in a small castle town in Italy. We spent the next week in Rome in an attempt to record in the Sistine Chapel, It was a long and ultimately unsuccessful wait, but during that time, I began to imagine a performance of a different nature.

Our instruments are somewhat more complicated then the flute, but only by today’s standards. It involves technology as complex as a digital recording studio and as simple as Julian’s violin and my African Kalimba. Sounds that are utterly unnatural as well as those that are immediate and human. We were looking for a valley. We wanted several miles of natural echo. We wanted no sound other then that of nature and we wanted our whole studio to play within it. I thought we would have had to wait awhile.

Ever since Scott Clemens (the editor of Epicurean) asked me to write articles for him, I am frequently amused at the unlikely coincidences that would make articles about music and sound fit into a magazine primarily about food and wine. Well... as it turns out (and here’s the rub) a couple of weeks ago, at the time of this writing, I got a call from Christopher Howell, the wine maker at Cain Vineyards. The Napa Valley Wine Auction was in the final planning stages and Christopher wanted something "different" for the luncheon that he was preparing.

Picture this: Cain is the Valhalla of vineyards. The winery and Christopher’s house rest upon the highest peak at the top of a mountain overlooking the lush Napa Valley. The acres of vineyard drape down into a valley like the folds of a Spanish dress. The tall grass on the hillside ripples like water adorned with mountain lupines and lavender. There is no sound other then a distant bird and a gentle breeze.

Christopher Howell is how I would define the word connoisseur. The essence of his vineyard, his home and his wine is unpretentious elegance and singular grace. He wanted his guests to experience something. He wanted them to sense the intangible pleasure of the short time that he had with them, the fragile tastes of the luncheon, the delicate aroma and flavor of his best wine and the warmth of the valley that produced it. Music and sound are an essential element to the passage of time and he wanted something "different".

Christopher invited me to visit Cain and to see his beautiful valley. I can assure you, it didn’t take long for us to start conjuring up wild ideas about how to handle the music for his event. Looking out over the valley, we began to wonder how it would sound if we mounted speakers in and around the hillside and projected music into the pool of the vineyard. After a few calls, some strange looks from technical folk, and a robust dose of pure trust, the stage was set.

We transported a portable version of The Magic Shop (a Mac Powerbook attached to a vast array of electronics) and our acoustic instruments to a tent set among the vines for the event. We invited percussionist Ed McClary and his own vast array of electronics to join us. A speaker stack was placed on the far side of the valley (at about one quarter mile away) and a UHF transmitter carried the signal. A second speaker was placed two hundred feet down in the center of the valley with a sound system placed in the tent around the dining tables.

The time that it takes for sound to traverse a distance is absolutely predictable. The latent boom that follows the crack of lightning is a measure of the space between. We reasoned that if we could measure the echo, we could set a musical tempo for the valley. One of the great tools that computers lend to music is the ability to accurately divide, multiply and manipulate time. At the first flourish from Julian’s violin, we knew that we were free.

The event began at Christopher’s house with hors d’ Ovres at the pool. We didn’t want to reveal all of our secrets at once so we played only our natural instruments, not as entertainers but rather as guests that were just having a little extra fun. Julian played a digeridoo from Australia, Ed on shakers and bells from Brazil and I played my Kalimbas (African thumb piano), This led to a comfortable sense of contact with the music and inevitable stories of world travel and unusual music emerged.

Italian church bells began ringing from the valley at great distances. Several people checked their watches. It was as if there was a monastery hidden among the vines and the familiar chimes marked the warm noon. This was our cue to play pied piper to the guests and to draw them through the rows towards the tent. During that walk, a soft chord began to eddy around the bells as if a cool fog had settled into the valley. I hurried ahead to the tent to accompany these tones on guitar with long ringing tones that echoed and responded to the curves of the hillside.

Speaking purely personally, It was a dream come true... I wished that I had a "stop" watch. That is, a watch that would "stop" time so that I could hang onto that sound in the valley for awhile. It was a great experience for me to see the faces of each person cresting the hill and fully grasping that the music was being created just for them and that the resounding bowl of the valley, the moment and their appreciation was the true instrument.

It is impossible to relate the warmth of the afternoon. Equally useless to explain the exact temperature and delicacy of the Cain Five and Cain Concept wines, the cool and refreshing luncheon. Julian, Ed and I performed for the next two hours with the vineyard as our backdrop. Our visual partner, Scott Dewar captured these photographs as a silent documentary.

Paul Horn has long been my friend and mentor. He is a great example of the tenuous edge that is the essence of live music and the expression of a time and place. But, as the true flavor of life reveals, you often only have the moment as it is lived. It can be unrepeatable, like the scent of jasmine.